Banksy Quotes

I decided to become a painter when my first four paintings where all published and attracted a great deal of interest. I exhibited one of them and it was sold.

The art industry is a totally different world, and to be appreciated in that different world is what matters to me.

When art wins, everyone wins.

People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.

When I started painting 17 years ago, I never imagined that anyone would look at my work or buy my pieces. But now I do about 14 exhibitions each year.

Great art should be shown with great excitement.

Sometimes when I walk into a gallery and I see someone's work, I think to myself, 'Gee, I wish I had done that.'

I never wanted to be someone who's asking someone to put my work in their gallery. I wanted to be asked.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.

'Certifiably Jonathan' contrives crises for its subject - a bid to get his paintings into MOMA, among others.

Art is something that nobody laughs at and nobody makes any money out of is the attitude, which I would dispute.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

Doing my art came out of something very solitary and something that I had no intention of showing anybody, and yet once people saw pieces in my house, it became really clear that there was a great demand for my art.

I have never collected an object or figure from Africa or Oceania because of anything curious about it or because of its utility or historic interest. Everything has been chosen entirely because of its aesthetic significance; its form, feeling, structure, and plastic values.

Not to say people shouldn't get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

A singer can quit once he or she has made ten great songs; a director can finish once he or she has made five amazing films; a writer just needs to write three great books.

Art is competitive.

We show people that anybody can paint a picture that they're proud of. It may never hang in the Smithsonian, but it will certainly be something that they'll hang in their home and be proud of. And that's what it's all about.

Effort and result are never simultaneous. In art, only the result counts.

A great painting is a great painting.

I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger.

Great Art is Great because it inspired you greatly. If it didn't, no matter what the critics, the museums and the galleries say, it's not great art for you.